Space mining opens new opportunities for extracting valuable resources such as minerals, water and gases on other planets, asteroids and the Moon. At the same time, it presents engineering challenges related to drilling, excavation, resource extraction, refinement, transport and storage that need to be addressed to achieve successful mining practices in space. Most of the mining technologies and methods used on Earth have to be further developed or re-though anew to account for specificities of space mining. The complex nature of space mining requires corresponding equipment and methods to extract and process ore, and more targeted and efficient problem solving approaches. This study focuses on using the methods of biomimicry to identify elements, systems or models of nature that can be helpful in developing solutions for some of the major engineering challenges in space mining.
CITATION: Melkoumian, N S, 2019. Using biomimicry to address engineering challenges in space mining, in Proceedings Future Mining 2019, pp 183184 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).